Today's links
Six years of Pluralistic (permalink)
Six years ago today, after 19 years with Boing Boing, during which time I wrote tens of thousands of blog posts, I started a new, solo blog, with the semi-ironic name "Pluralistic." I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be, but I wasn't writing Boing Boing anymore, and I knew I wanted to keep writing the web in some fashion.
Six years and more than 1,500 posts later, I am so satisfied with how Pluralistic is going. I spent a couple of decades processing everything that seemed interesting or significant through a blog, which created a massive database (and mnemonically available collection of partially developed thoughts) that I'm now reprocessing as a series of essays that make sense of today in light of everything that I've thought about for my whole adult life, which are, in turn, fodder for books, both fiction and nonfiction. I call this "The Memex Method":
https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/09/the-memex-method/
"The Memex Method" is also the title of a collection of essays (from this blog) that I've sold to Farrar, Straus and Giroux, but that book keeps getting bumped because of other books I end up writing based on the work I do here, starting with last year's Enshittification. I'm now fully two books ahead of myself, with The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI coming in June, and The Post-American Internet in early 2027 (in addition to two graphic novels and a short story collection). Professionally speaking, these are the most successful books I've written, in a long, 30+ book career with many notable successes. Intellectually and artistically speaking, I'm incredibly satisfied with the direction my career has moved in over my six Pluralistic years.
Blogging is – and always has been – a lot of work for me, but it's work that pays off, even if I don't always know what form that payoff will take.
One essential part of this blog is my daily retrospective of posts from this day through my blogging history – 25 years ago, 20 years ago, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, 5 years ago, and last year. I used to call this "This day in history" but now I call it "Object permanence," for the developmental milestone when toddlers gain the ability to remember and reason about things that have recently happened (roughly, it's the point at which "peek-a-boo" stops being fun).
The daily business of reviewing and selecting blog posts from different parts of my life started as a trivial exercise, but it's become one of the most important things I do. I liken it to working dough and folding the dry crumbly edges back into the center; in this case, I'm folding all the fragments that are in danger of escaping my working memory back into the center of my attention.
Six years ago, I didn't know what Pluralistic was going to be. Today, I still don't know. But because this is a labor of love, and a solo project, I get to try anything and either give it up or carry it on based on how it makes me feel and what effect it has on my life. I'm always tinkering with the format: this year, I also added a subhead to the Object Permanence section that tries to call out (in as few characters as possible) the most important elements of the day's list.
I also dropped some things this year, notably, my "linkdump" posts. A couple years ago, at the suggestion of Mitch Wagner, I added a new section called "Hey look at this," which featured three bare links to things I thought were noteworthy but didn't have time or inclination to delve into in depth. Later, I expanded this section to five.
However, even with five bare links per edition, I often found myself with a backlog of noteworthy things. So I started writing the occasional Saturday "linkdump" essay in which I wove together the whole backlog into a giant, meandering essay. These made for interesting rhetorical challenges, as I found elegant ways to bridge completely disparate subjects – a kind of collaging, perhaps akin to how a mashup artist mixes two very different tracks together. Mentally, I thought of this as "ringing the changes," but ultimately, I decided to drop these linkdump posts (for now, at least). They ended up being too much work, and of little value to me, because I found myself unable to remember what I wrote in them and thus to call them up to refer to them for future posts. Here's all 33 linkdumps; they're not gone forever (not so long as the links pile up in my backlog), but when they come back, they'll be in a different form:
https://pluralistic.net/tag/linkdump/
This really is a labor of love, in the sense that I love doing it, and because it's hard work. The fact that it's hard work is a feature, not a bug. Working hard on stuff is really important to me, because when I am working hard, I gain respite from both physical and mental discomfort. As a guy with serious chronic pain living through the Trump years, I've got plenty of both kinds of discomfort. I can't overstate how physically and mentally beneficial it is to me to have an activity that takes me out of the moment. This year, I wrote several editions of Pluralistic from an infusion couch at the Kaiser Sunset hematology center in LA, where I was receiving immunotherapy for a cancer diagnosis that I'm assured is very treatable, but which – to be totally honest – sometimes gets my old worrier running hot:
https://pluralistic.net/2024/11/05/carcinoma-angels/#squeaky-nail
Making Pluralistic is several kinds of hard work. Over the past six years, I've become an ardent collagist, spending more and more time on the weird, semi-grotesque images that run atop every edition. Anything you devote substantial time to on a near-daily basis is something that gives you insight – into yourself, and into the thing you're doing. I've always had a certain familiarity with computer image editing (I think I got my start writing Apple ][+ BASIC programs that spat out ASCII art, before graduating to making pixel-art for Broderbund's "Print Shop"), but I've never applied myself to any visual field in a serious way, until now.
Amazingly, after 50 years of thinking of myself as someone who is "bad at visual art," I find myself identifying as a visual artist. I find myself pondering visual works the same way I think about prose – mentally tearing it apart to unpick how it is done, and thinking about how I could productively steal some new techniques for my own work. I'm also privileged to have some accomplished visual artists in my circle, like my pal Alistair Milne, who generously share technical and aesthetic tips. It's got to the point where I published a book of my art, and I think I'll probably do it again next year:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
There's also a ton of technical work that goes into publishing each edition of this newsletter. Things have moved on somewhat since I published an in-depth process-post in 2021, though I'm still totally reliant on Loren Kohnfelder's python scripts that help me turn the XML file I compose every day into files that are (nearly) ready to publish:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/13/two-decades/#hfbd
Much of the technical work is down to the fact that I'm still completely wed to the idea of "POSSE" (Post Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere):
https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/19/now-we-are-two/#two-much-posse
This means that after I write the day's post, I reformat it and republish it as a text-only newsletter, a Medium post, a Tumblr post, a Twitter thread and a Mastodon thread. This involves a ton of manual work, because none of the services I post to are designed to facilitate this, so I'm always wrestling with them. This year, all of them got worse (incredibly).
Medium – where I used to have a paid column – has dropped its free-flag for my account, which now limits me to how many posts I can schedule. This doesn't come up often, but when I do schedule a post, it's generally because I'm going to be on a plane or a stage and won't be able to do it manually. There's no way I'm going to pay for this feature: I'm happy to give Medium my work gratis, but I will not and do not pay anyone to publish my work, and I never will.
Tumblr did something to its post-composing text editor that completely broke it and I've given up on fixing it. I can't even type into a new post field! I have to paste in some styled text, then delete it, then start typing. It's ghastly. So now I just have a text file full of formatted HTML snippets and I work exclusively in the Tumblr HTML editor, pasting in blobs of preformatted HTML (including the florid, verbose HTML Tumblr uses for its own formatting) and then laboriously flip back and forth to the "visual" editor to see the parts that went wrong. Here's how busted that visual editor is: searching for a word then double-clicking on it does not select it. You have to click once, wait about 1.5 seconds, click again, wait again, and then you can select the word.
Twitter has entered a period of terminal technical decline. I know, I know, we always talk about how fucked Twitter's content moderation is, for obvious and good reasons, but from a technical perspective, Twitter just sucks. If I make a post with an image and alt text in anticipation of later using it to start a thread, it often goes "stale" and will not publish until I delete the image and re-attach it and re-paste the alt text. Meanwhile, the thread editor is also decaying into uselessness. Fill in a 25-post thread and hit publish and, the majority of times, the thread publication will die midway through, displaying lots of weird failure modes (phantom empty posts at the end of the thread that need to be individually selected and deleted are a common one, but not the only one). The old Twitter's ability to add a new thread to an existing one has been dead for at least a year, so every post after the 25th stanza has to be manually tacked on to the previous one, which is made far harder by the fact that Twitter no longer reliably shows you the post you just made after it publishes.
Mastodon still lacks a decent thread editor, one that has even the minimal functionality of Twitter circa 2020. Meanwhile, the Fediverse HOA continues to surface from time to time, with someone who's had a Masto account for ten seconds scolding me for posting threads – from my account whose bio starts "I post long threads." It's genuinely tedious to be shouted at for "using Mastodon wrong" by someone who started using Mastodon yesterday (I opened my first Mastodon account in 2018!), and even worse when they double down after I point them to the essay I've written to explain why I post the way I do, and what to do if you want to read my work somewhere that's not your Mastodon timeline ("Can you believe this asshole wrote a whole essay to explain why he posts his stupid Mastodon threads?"):
https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/16/how-to-make-the-least-worst-mastodon-threads/
Then there's email: I continue to love email, but email doesn't love me back. After years of being blackholed by AT&T and then Google, this turns out to be the year that Microsoft bounces thousands of messages to its Hotmail and Outlook users because they have arbitrarily and without warning added my mail-server to a blacklist. Thank you to the Fediverse friends who escalated my trouble ticket – but man, this is a headache I could certainly do without:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/10/dead-letters/
My sysadmin, the incomparable and tireless Ken Snider, tells me that he's got the long-overdue new hardware installed at the colo and he's nearly ready to stand up my long-anticipated personal Mastodon server, which will let me solve all kinds of problems. He's also going to stand up my own Bluesky server, at which point I will part ways with Twitter. I wish I could have used the regular Bluesky service while I waited, but just setting up an account permanently binds you to totally unacceptable and dangerous terms of service:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/15/dogs-breakfast/#by-clicking-this-you-agree-on-behalf-of-your-employer-to-release-me-from-all-obligations-and-waivers-arising-from-any-and-all-NON-NEGOTIATED-agreements
What's the point of a service that has account- and data-portability if signing up for it makes you permanently surrender your rights, even if you switch servers? This might be the stupidest social media unforced error of the post-zuckermuskian era.
There is one technology that has made my POSSE life better, and it might surprise you. This year, I installed Ollama – an open-source LLM – on my laptop. It runs pretty well, even without a GPU. Every day, before I run Loren's python publication scripts, I run the text through Ollama as a typo-catcher (my prompt is "find typos"). Ollama always spots three or four of these, usually stuff like missing punctuation, or forgotten words, or double words ("the the next thing") or typos that are still valid words ("of top of everything else").
The reason this is so valuable to me is that errors magnify through each stage of POSSE. Errors that make it through the python publication script take 10x the time to fix that they would if I caught them beforehand. Errors that I catch after running the scripts and publishing the posts take 10x time more. Errors that I have to fix later on – once I've closed all the relevant tabs and editors – take 10x again more time. Some POSSE channels (email, Twitter) can't be fixed at all.
So catching these typos at the start of the process is a huge time-saver. I have some very generous readers who have the proofreader's gene and are very helpful in catching my typos (hi, Gregory and 9o6!), and I feel bad about depriving them of their fun, but there's still the odd error that slips through, and they always catch it.
Ollama is a pretty good typo-catcher. Probably half of the "errors" it points out are false positives, which is better than the false positive rate for Google Docs' grammar-checker. As someone who uses a lot of jargon, made up words, etc in his prose, I'm used to overriding my text-editor. I wouldn't simply trust an LLM's edits any more than I would accept every suggestion from a spell-checker. Hell, yesterday I sent back a professionally copyedited manuscript (the intro for the paperback of Enshittification) and marked "STET" on about a third of the queries.
Doubtless some of you are affronted by my modest use of an LLM. You think that LLMs are "fruits of the poisoned tree" and must be eschewed because they are saturated with the sin of their origins. I think this is a very bad take, the kind of rathole that purity culture always ends up in.
Let's start with some context. If you don't want to use technology that was created under immoral circumstances or that sprang from an immoral mind, then you are totally fucked. I mean, all the way down to the silicon chips in your device, which can never be fully disentangled from the odious, paranoid racist William Shockley, who won the Nobel Prize for co-inventing the silicon transistor:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/24/the-traitorous-eight-and-the-battle-of-germanium-valley/
Further, we wouldn't have the packet-switched network that delivered these words to you without the contributions of the literal war-criminals at the RAND corporation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
Refusing to use a technology because the people who developed it were indefensible creeps is a self-owning dead-end. You know what's better than refusing to use a technology because you hate its creators? Seizing that technology and making it your own. Don't like the fact that a convicted monopolist has a death-grip on networking? Steal its protocol, release a free software version of it, and leave it in your dust:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/samba-versus-smb-adversarial-interoperability-judo-network-effects
That's how we make good tech: not by insisting that all its inputs be free from sin, but by purging that wickedness by liberating the technology from its monstrous forebears and making free and open versions of it:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/14/contesting-popularity/#everybody-samba
Purity culture is such an obvious trap, an artifact of the neoliberal ideology that insists that the solution to all our problems is to shop very carefully, thus reducing all politics to personal consumption choices:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/31/unsatisfying-answers/#systemic-problems
I mean, it was extraordinarily stupid for the Nazis to refuse Einstein's work because it was "Jewish science," but not merely because antisemitism is stupid. It was also a major self-limiting move because Einstein was right:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-2-pro-nazi-nobelists-attacked-einstein-s-jewish-science-excerpt1/
Refusing to run an LLM on your laptop because you don't like Sam Altman is as foolish as refusing to get monoclonal antibodies because James Watson was a racist nutjob:
https://www.statnews.com/2025/11/07/james-watson-remembrance-from-dna-pioneer-to-pariah/
Or to refuse to communicate via satellite because they were launched into space on a descendant of a rocket designed by the Nazi Wernher von Braun and built by slaves in a death camp:
https://wsmrmuseum.com/2020/07/27/von-braun-the-v-2-and-slave-labor/4/
The AI bubble sucks. AI itself is a normal technology:
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-normal-technology
It's not "unethical" to scrape the web in order to create and analyze data-sets. That's just "a search engine":
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/
There's plenty of useful things people can do with AI. There's plenty of useful things people will do with AI. AI is bad because it's an economic bubble and a grift, but not because we've created a bunch of utilities that would – under normal circumstances – be called "plug-ins":
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington
I started blogging 25 years ago, just before the dotcom bubble popped. That bubble-pop inflicted a lot of pain on people who didn't deserve it, including the normie investors who'd been suckered into blowing their life's savings on dogshit stocks, and everyday workers who found themselves out of a job. But the world was better off. So was the web. With the bubble popped, real, good stuff could access talent, servers and office space.
In the six years I've been doing this, I've seen several bubbles come and go: crypto, web3, metaverse. Now it's AI. But those bubbles were like Enron, frauds that left nothing good behind. AI is like the dotcom bubble, awash in sin and inflicting untold misery, but it will leave something useful behind:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop
And when it does, I'll make sense of it on this blog.
Hey look at this (permalink)
Object permanence (permalink)
#20yrsago HOWTO resist warrantless searches at Best Buy https://www.die.net/musings/bestbuy/
#20yrsago RIAA using kids’ private info to attack their mother https://web.archive.org/web/20060223111437/http://p2pnet.net/story/7942
#20yrsago Sony BMG demotes CEO for deploying DRM https://web.archive.org/web/20060219233817/http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/060210/germany_sony_bmg_ceo.html?.v=7
#20yrsago Sistine Chapel recreated through 10-year cross-stitch project https://web.archive.org/web/20060214195146/http://www.austinstitchers.org/Show06/images/sistine2.jpg
#20yrsago J Edgar Hoover loved Lucy https://web.archive.org/web/20060425120915/http://www.lucylibrary.com/pages/lucy-news-fbi.letter.html
#20yrsago Bad Samaritan family won’t return found expensive camera https://web.archive.org/web/20060222200300/https://lostcamera.blogspot.com/2006/02/camera-unlost-but-not-quite-found.html
#15yrsago What does Libyan revolution mean for bit.ly? https://domainnamewire.com/2011/02/18/is-bit-ly-toast-if-libya-shuts-down-the-internet/
#15yrsago Optical illusion inventor goes on to invent copyright threats against 3D printing company https://web.archive.org/web/20110221185839/https://blog.thingiverse.com/2011/02/18/copyright-and-intellectual-property-policy/#respond
#15yrsago Crappy themepark operators convicted of “engaging in a commercial practice which was a misleading action” https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/feb/18/lapland-theme-park-brothers-convicted
#15yrsago HBGary’s high-volume astroturfing technology and the Feds who requested it https://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/02/16/945768/-UPDATED:-The-HB-Gary-Email-That-Should-Concern-Us-All
#15yrsago Authors Guild argues in favor of censorship (also: they don’t know shit about Shakespeare) https://volokh.com/2011/02/17/there-should-be-a-name-for-this-one-too/
#15yrsago Hollywood hospital ransoms itself back from hackers for a mere $17,000 https://web.archive.org/web/20160227094254/https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-me-ln-hollywood-hospital-bitcoin-20160217-story.html
#15yrsago Chinese millionaire sues himself through an offshore shell company to beat currency export controls https://web.archive.org/web/20180526235055/https://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2016/02/16/china-capital-flight-2-0-lose-a-lawsuit-on-purpose/?guid=BL-CJB-28691&dsk=y
#15yrsago Selling cookies like a crack dealer, by dangling a string out your kitchen window https://laughingsquid.com/cookies-sold-by-string-dangling-from-san-francisco-apartment-window/
#15yrsago Midwestern Tahrir: Workers refuse to leave Wisconsin capital over Tea Party labor law https://www.theawl.com/2011/02/wisconsin-demonstrates-against-scott-walkers-war-on-unions/
#10yrsago Back-room revisions to TPP sneakily criminalize fansubbing & other copyright grey zones https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/02/sneaky-change-tpp-drastically-extends-criminal-penalties
#10yrsago Russian Central Bank shutting down banks that staged fake cyberattacks to rip off depositors https://web.archive.org/web/20160220100817/http://www.scmagazine.com/russian-bank-licences-revoked-for-using-hackers-to-withdraw-funds/article/474477/
#10yrsago Stop paying your student loans and debt collectors can send US Marshals to arrest you https://web.archive.org/web/20201026202024/https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/02/us-marshals-forcibly-collecting-student-debt.html?mid=twitter-share-di
#5yrsago Reverse centaurs and the failure of AI https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/17/reverse-centaur/#reverse-centaur
#5yrsago Strength in numbers https://pluralistic.net/2021/02/18/ink-stained-wretches/#countless
#5yrsago America and "national capitalism" https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/18/pikettys-productivity/#reaganomics-revenge
#1yrago Business school professors trained an AI to judge workers' personalities based on their faces https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/17/caliper-ai/#racism-machine
Upcoming appearances (permalink)
Recent appearances (permalink)
- "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce
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"Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/
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"Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).
-
"The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).
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"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).
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"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
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"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.
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"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
- "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
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"Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026
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"The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027
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"Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2027
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"The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027
Today's top sources:
Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America (1013 words today, 31953 total)
- "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.
-
"The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.
-
A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
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